Understanding how blogs can support collaborative learning is a vital concern for researchers and teachers. This article explores how blogs may be used to support secondary education students' collaborative interaction and how such an interaction process can promote the creation of a Community of Inquiry to enhance critical thinking and…

E-Learning brings access to a powerful but often overlooked teaching tool: random number generation. Using random number generation, a practically infinite number of quantitative problem-solution sets can be created. In addition, within the e-learning context, in the spirit of the mastery of learning, it is possible to assign online quantitative…

This article represents an attempt to more fully understand the interactions of individuals in a specific community of practice on the World Wide Web. It attempts to answer questions about whether norms of participation and learning developed over time have been established in this virtual community of practice. It also explores how the perceived…

Neoliberalism has become the dominant ideology of our day. As with all ideologies, it influences without drawing attention to itself. Critical pedagogy, with its focus on the oppressed and marginalised, offers a perspective on the media and education that seeks to expose neoliberalism's hegemonic power. Traditional media has become complicit…

In this article the authors examine motivational constructs through the lens of new media-supported educational efforts. By examining a range of online, new-media-based learning communities and instructional technologies, they analyze the ways in which motivation is positioned within the field of education, how ecologies of motivation embedded…

Social media now form a common part of university students' experience. Both at university and after graduation, in their personal and professional lives, social media offer opportunities for connection previously unavailable. The ubiquitous nature of social networking has brought with it professional and ethical issues that need to be…

This article explores youth making media across genre practices. The author begins with a discussion of youth media arts, followed by a discussion of remix in the digital era. An exemplary video poem project from the San Francisco Bay Area is described to illustrate the importance of critical solidarity among youth. The multimodal design,…

It is recognised that from a young age children spend considerable portions of their leisure time on the Internet. In Australia a number of child-targeted magazines have associated websites, which have high and ever-increasing readership. We do not yet know the impact of this medium upon children. Overt advertising is evident on webpages, but so…

Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes place on a…

During the 2010-11 academic year, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia, worked with professors at universities across the United States who were interested in using Wikipedia as a teaching tool in their classrooms through a pilot version of the Wikipedia Education Program. This article presents a case study…

Misled by a quick triumphalism of the social media, the international news agencies have confused the two: revolt and revolution. The past episodes of unrest started as a social, not a political, public revolt. Through the pain of sobriety, the protesters are learning that neither globalisation nor the McFB way of life is a shortcut to…

This article is an exploratory study of student behavior using online tools to do project-based work for a library science course at a mid-sized Midwestern public university. The population was 22 net generation students aged 18-24, who were enrolled in an Introduction to Information Resources course. The study was designed to better understand…

This article is about the informal learning that took place in an online divorce support and advice forum. In it, the author discusses the formation of a community of practice among the members during the first nine months of the site's operation. The author shows how the key markers of mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire…

This article takes as its point of departure a language project which is a subproject under the larger ongoing (2007-2011) research project Serious Games on a Global Market Place. The language project follows how the virtual universe known as Mingoville (http://www.mingoville.com) becomes an actor in English education for beginners. The virtual…

This article presents a qualitative case study that uses discourse and social semiotic analysis methods in order to examine the rhetorical construction of fictional personas within an online role play used for learning in the college classroom. Of special focus are the differing patterns of semiotic resource use (for example, language and…